


every line, every rhyme

by dutchydoescoke



Category: The Get Down (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 05:34:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10564653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dutchydoescoke/pseuds/dutchydoescoke
Summary: He recounts their story, from record to arrest, every word, every line, every rhyme.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know what this is and i'm sorry in advance. it happened after i finished part two.
> 
> warning for split second mention of drugs but that's it (which is fucking rare for me holy shit)

He hasn’t talked to Shao in years. Doesn’t even know for sure if he’s alive or dead.

When he and his team talk it out, they decide it: this is the album, the tour, the _show_ that takes him right back to the Bronx. Right back to the streets where he and Shao used to run. A throwback album, they decide, to talk about his roots, how he grew up.

He can’t avoid talking about Shao, no matter how hard it is. He knows that. Shao is such a large part of his history, casting shadows that still fall over him even now, and Zeke misses him.

In the end, the album ends up being Shao’s story as much as his. That first year, they were so wrapped up in each other that remembering who said and did what is a challenge, memories of voices and music blurring together.

He splits it—an A side and a B side.

The beginning and the end.

(Nobody needs to know about the in-between, the nights Zeke fell asleep in Shao’s dilapidated poor-man’s mansion after drinking too much, the nights they spent on the roof, passing a joint back and forth, the times that conversation turned too heavy and silence reigned, legs tucked against each other as a substitute for the words they couldn’t say, the contact they couldn’t initiate. Those are his and his alone.)

He mails tickets and passes to the New York show to Flash’s old address, to the empty building that once held Les Inferno, even to the fucking lot where the mansion used to be, _Shao_ on the front of the envelope, written carefully, painstakingly neat, in black ink that’s almost iridescent under the hotel lamp. There’s a phone number inside.

Shao needs to see this, to hear this.

Shao needs to _know_.

Zeke hasn’t forgotten him. Zeke can’t forget him.

Twenty years, too many fights with Mylene, too many chances to talk and apologize that he should have—could have—taken earlier that he didn’t, and Shaolin Fantastic is still his goddamn hero.

Shao doesn’t call.

Zeke tries not to let it bother him.

He pretends, in a way he hasn’t needed to since he left. He pretends he missed Shao’s call. He pretends Shao didn’t feel like leaving a message on the answering machine he bought the same day he mailed the tickets. He pretends Shao might still care.

He pretends Shao’s somewhere in the arena and walks onstage with a confidence he doesn’t feel.

The sweat dripping down his neck reminds him of summer back then, temperatures climbing until he felt like dying, air-conditioning nothing but a fever dream, sidewalks baking in the heat and holding onto it until long after night fell. The spotlights make him think of 10-51, of playing Les Inferno, of the unity show, and he pretends the harshness is why he keeps his sunglasses on and not the fact that he’s still searching the crowd.

They’re a mass of dark shapes, nothing that makes any of them stand out. He imagines Shao showing up in red, bright enough to catch the lights, catch Zeke’s eyes. But the audience remains anonymous and he wonders if it’s not that Shao’s dead, just that Shao doesn’t care.

He recounts their story, from record to arrest, every word, every line, every rhyme.

When the lights go down, when it’s over, there’s a weight on Zeke’s shoulders, and walking away from the stage feels too much like walking away from Shao, even if it’s linoleum under his feet instead of asphalt and he’s not about to crawl back on his belly to beg forgiveness from his relatives.

(Not family. His family spent the better part of a decade scattered to the four winds. Boo in jail, Dizzee alternating between imprisonment, writing and restitution, Ra the only one to stay at home. He hasn’t seen Shao since that night. They’re still scattered, but it’s by choice, this time.)

He peels off his in-ears and the tape in place under his shirt, passing them off with the mic. His jacket follows, tossed onto a chair while he tries not to feel like the lost kid he hasn’t been in decades.

Shao might have heard the album, might have listened to what Zeke was trying to say and, because of what it meant, he stayed away.

Ra, Boo, and Dizzee had listened to it before it came out, all of them with wide eyes and meaningful looks, and Zeke knew why. The entire album’s a goddamn love letter to someone he left behind and Shao might not want that anymore, if he ever did.

Might not want _him_ , and that’s a thought he wants to take back, but the crowd’s gone quiet and he hasn’t seen a flash of red all night. He can take a hint, be it from Shao or the universe.

He just wishes it didn’t hurt like a punch to the gut.

He’s about to get up and go, crawl back to his apartment and drink his way through his liquor cabinet when he sees red and a voice he didn’t actually expect to hear speaks.

“Hey, Books.”


End file.
